Guest Post: Gotta be reality

A guest post by a reader:

I remember the final time my father descended into madness.  It happened several times in my life.  The last time was when I was 24.

When it became clear he would slide completely into paranoid schizophrenia, I signed a committal order and watched the cops kick in both doors of the home I grew up in – they went in hard and fast.

“Where did you last see him?” They had asked, just after I signed the order and before they went in.

“In the kitchen,” was my solemn reply, scarcely believing what was happening.

“Are there knives around?”  They asked.

“Errr… It’s a kitchen…” After a pause, I then confirmed, “yes, there are knives”.  Hence the door kicking.

But I digress.

A few days before that, we had celebrated my younger brother’s 18th birthday at my parents’ house.  Dad was well on his way into madness by then, pacing back and forth in the lounge.  I was on one side of the room, my little brother on the other side, Dad pacing in the middle.  He was talking furiously. Not babbling, but not making much sense either.  I looked across at my brother and said “Happy birthday” and smiled.  It was a ridiculous situation.  To properly understand, you’d need to hear a few backstories: a childhood of police raids, drug use and chaos turned a corner when Mum and Dad quit heroin/methadone and petty crime.  My teenage years were more stable, albeit Dad traded being a drug addict for an alcoholic.  It was surreal that we were heading back into the chaos of madness again.

I vividly remember a phrase my dad repeated many times that night.

“Gotta, gotta, gotta be reality.  Is it reality? Is it?  IS IT?  HAHAHAAAAHAHHAH”

He was grappling to hold onto reality, trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

But that phrase has always stuck with me.  It’s a lens that can be applied to many things in life. Learning to distinguish between what is real vs what you want, or fear to be real is enormously useful. 

I enjoy watching politics.  I’ve dabbled in policy – it was considerably harder than I realised!  Political parties have many policy ideas.  They sometimes SOUND amazing.  They are well intentioned.  The problem policies often encounter is rational human behaviour.  Reality.

There is an excellent series on “Unintended Consequences“.  It lists many examples of well-intentioned local or central government policies that resulted in completely opposite outcomes.  It’s pretty funny, but also sad.

Wealth taxes are a good example of unintended consequences. Your opinion on the merits of a wealth tax is irrelevant.  When a wealth tax is implemented, tax revenues decrease.  This is because people act rationally.  History proves it.  Many times.  It won’t work.

So when you evaluate the policies of the various political parties this election, spare a thought for the most likely outcome of those policies. A policy you like can be innovative, ideologically appealing, or compassionate.   

But in the end, for it to work, it’s gotta be reality.